Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (35 page)

“This is where Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders waited before heading to free Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The ride up San Juan Hill and all that jazz.”

Serge opened the trunk and got out a wooden shoeshine box from the thirties. Inside were four clamps, masking tape, a shock of natural sponge, a pencil, camel-hair and synthetic brushes, eleven metal tubes of color and a round tin mixing tray.

Serge clamped a thick piece of textured paper to a square of plywood and wetted down the top half. He spread cerulean blue lightly with the one-inch brush. He was going to put down a heavier layer to outline the clouds, but the initial covering had to dry first.

“Come on, come on, come on!” Serge said rapidly,
tapping hard on the edge of the plywood. He held it up at an angle and saw it was still wet. “Screw it!” he said, and threw the watercolor supplies back in the trunk.

They got in the car and headed west.

“Remember Jules Verne? That book he wrote about going to the moon?” Serge asked. “He had the astronauts take off from Tampa—here’s the plaque. But actually, he had them take off from Belle Shoals, a wide spot in the road way out in the eastern part of the country. Early this century, there was a pipe sticking out of the ground out there, irrigation or something. A lot of people thought it was the cannon that fired the astronauts to the moon. True story.”

Coleman inhaled a Budweiser. “I’m hungry again. And thirsty.”

“We’re on our way,” said Serge. They raced up Howard Avenue for Cuban sandwiches-to-go at the Fourth of July restaurant and backtracked to the Old Meeting House for creamy shakes from the fifties. They hit the Tiny Tap and the Chatterbox.

Coleman was halfway in the bag, playing darts, when he nearly hit someone coming out of the rest room, and Serge had to smooth it out with money and a promise to leave.

The setting sun glinted first from the tail of the silver 727. The reflection ran the length of the jet to the nose as it landed at Tampa International Airport.

Seven floors up, from the top deck of short-term parking, Serge took photos of the Whisperjet. Coleman popped another sixteen-ounce Bud.

“Here’s a tip: If you ever want to gauge the status of a civilization, check out its convenience stores and airports,” said Serge. He snapped more pictures. “I saw the SST land here. That’s a French plane.”

Serge opened the trunk and stowed the camera. He removed his suit bag and slammed the trunk lid. “Saw a night space shuttle launch too. It was going to meet the Mir space station so it took off at a fifty-one-degree inclination thataway”—Serge pointing—“instead of the regular twenty-seven degrees that way. You could actually see it attain orbit and go down over the horizon.”

Coleman nodded, thinking of food.

Serge told Coleman to take off his shirt and pants. He threw the suit bag over the roof of the car and unzipped it. Coleman looked around but the only other people were a couple waiting for the elevators.

“
Miami Vice
changed television—and Florida,” said Serge. “There’s this one episode where a chick comes up to Don Johnson next to a swimming pool. She takes an ice cube out of Johnson’s drink and rubs it between her breasts.”

Serge handed Coleman dark slacks and dress shoes. Next, a white pinpoint oxford cloth shirt, black tie, and a gold tie tack that looked like an eagle.

“The chick drops the ice cube back in Don Johnson’s drink, like he’s supposed to get flustered,” said Serge. “Johnson just picks it out of his drink, tosses it in his mouth and starts crunching.”

“Now that’s class,” said Coleman.

“It was a golden era,” said Serge.

Serge had Coleman slip on a dark suit coat with gold bars on the shoulders and gold rings around the cuffs. He put on a cap with gold braiding on the visor.

Serge grabbed the lapels and tugged, straightening the fit on Coleman. Coleman stood at attention. “How do I look?”

“Like the man who just landed that jet,” said Serge.

Serge had picked up the uniform when he’d rolled two pilots in their hotel room the month before. He and Coleman took the elevator down from the parking garage to the concourse, where they grabbed the monorail for Airside D. Airport and airline employees nodded politely and some called Coleman “captain.”

Serge and Coleman parked themselves at the airside lounge. Coleman ordered a shot of Jack Daniel’s and a beer chaser. The bartender raised his eyebrows at the pilot’s uniform. Serge said, “Mineral water.”

Serge asked the bartender to change the TV to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who were playing the Florida Panthers. The hockey game joined the sunset and the view of planes landing and taking off to fulfill Serge, and he hammered his mineral water in one pull and slammed the glass on the bar.

“Hit me!” he told the bartender.

“Me too!” said Coleman, slamming down his empty whiskey.

For two hours, Coleman went though bourbon and beer. Travelers double-taked at the pilot on the stool, laughing and pounding his palm on the counter,
spilling drinks and scattering bowls of peanuts. An eighty-year-old man wandered the concourse, clutching a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes letter and looking for Dick Clark.

“Another drinky-winky, mister bartender man. Make it shnappy,” Coleman slurred, “I have a plane to catch.” He howled and pounded on the bar some more. Travelers pointed in horror.

The bartender cut Coleman off and they left and walked down the concourse. Coleman’s shirt was untucked and his pilot’s hat on sideways as he weaved down the airside. The crowd at each gate tightened as Coleman approached and sighed as he passed.

Before leaving for the parking garage, Coleman walked up the last gate and addressed everyone: “Has anybody seen my keys? I have to get to Kansas City.” As the crowd stared at Coleman and recoiled, Serge worked behind them, silently stealing two briefcases and a laptop.

Residential Ybor City had a crime problem. All of Serge’s windows were barred. He kept a Ruger between the cushions of the couch. Once or twice a month he’d hear low voices outside the house, possibly a knock after midnight, car trouble.

At such times, Serge would turn off the TV and rack his Beretta twelve-gauge. The distinct sound made problems vanish.

While Serge took every precaution, Coleman stumbled around town all fucked up, openly making friends and inviting everyone back to the house.

Serge constantly awoke to find strangers searching his cabinets or shouting at invisible demons.

“And what the hell is
this!
” Serge asked Coleman, pointing at the naked wino passed out on the living room floor with bagpipes and a Viking helmet.

Once Serge woke with a gun in his face and two men going through his valuables. Another time the place had already been ransacked by the time he got up.

“This shit’s gotta stop!” Serge kept saying.

One night, Serge awoke at three
A.M
. on the living room sofa and thought he heard talking in another part of the house. And a faint buzzing sound. He checked in the kitchen and the bathroom. The bedroom door was closed and the slit underneath was bright with light.

Serge opened the door. On the bed, on top of the sheets, was a striking blonde. Lightly curling hair on the pillow. She wore red pumps, and that was it. The buzzing sound was a vibrator.

Coleman sat on the side of the room in his rainbow Afro, thumbing a
Mad Magazine
. A row of empty beers on the windowsill. “Oh,” he said, noticing Serge, “meet Sharon.” He leaned down over the nightstand and vacuumed up a line of cocaine, then returned to his magazine.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” Serge said. Nobody answered.

Coleman burned the scrambled eggs on the gas stove and ate them anyway. The sky was getting light, but nobody had slept. Sharon sat at the break
fast table, looking dazed at the ashtray as she tapped a Marlboro. Thinking about her bad luck, the insurance company denying Mount Batten’s life insurance and threatening to go to the cops if she didn’t sign a waiver.

Serge read three newspapers.

“So I see her by the railroad tracks at Fifteenth Street,” Coleman said with a mouth full of yellow. “And I say, ‘Hey, hey, why you lookin’ so down? This is a party town!’ and she says, ‘I like coke.’”

Serge interrupted, “So she says she knows where you can get some great stuff but she’s all out of money.”

Coleman gestured at Serge with toast. “You know her?”

“Metaphysically.”

Against Serge’s expectations, Sharon didn’t split at the first opportunity and tagged along with them to the Lowry Park Zoo.

“I love the zoo,” Coleman said at the suggestion. Sharon had Coleman stop and get some more coke and she walked around the zoo doing it every place she could. Her blonde hair was matted, wild-looking and sexy in a trampy sort of way. Her shiny blue bicycle pants showed off even more of a striking figure than Serge thought he’d seen the night before. Her sunglasses were impenetrable, and she snorted brazenly above the rhino pit. Two preppies from the University of South Florida tried to hit on her with cocaine jokes.

Sharon positioned her body between them and her powder and snapped, “Get your own!”

Three days later the trio was still intact. Coleman and Sharon were in the living room, watching TV. Serge in the kitchen, slicing white onions. His mom had never cooked native dishes, and Serge hadn’t discovered Cuban food until he’d moved to Tampa, which made him appreciate it as a foreign delicacy. He had yellow rice going on one burner and dropped the onions in the pot of black beans. He stirred shredded flank steak in the frying pan with tomato paste, peppers and more onions. The bread was on the table: The Cuban bakery on Florida Avenue dropped a palm sprig in the bag with each thin three-foot loaf, for religious good luck. Coleman wandered in. “Those bananas are really bruised.”

“They’re plantains,” said Serge and sliced them fat. This was his favorite part. He quick-fried them a little burnt, the way he liked. He could hear Coleman back in the living room with Sharon, watching
Wheel of Fortune
.

“Skirting with disaster?” Sharon guessed at the secret phrase.

“No,” said Coleman, “I think it’s Shirting with disaster.”

Great, thought Serge, The Three Freakin’ Musketeers. A ringleader, a mascot and a hood ornament.

The state of Florida was in a heat wave in early spring.

Three stove-bellied men marched abreast down a sidewalk in Sarasota, forcing visitors and retirees into the gutter. Their leather jackets were festooned with nonfunctional chains. The back of each jacket had an unfaded zone in the shape of a large patch, bordered by broken stitching.

“Who ever heard of bikers without bikes!” one said. “Now we just look like goddamn drunks.”

“But we
are
drunks,” said a second.

“Shut the fuck up!” said the third. “I need to think.”

They waited. Nothing.

The first biker sneered at an old lady, who hissed back and raised her walker at him like a lion tamer.

“See what I mean?” he said. “No respect.”

The men sat on a street bench next to a pair of
fashionably depressed students from New College, who gave the bikers the creeps.

The trio had been kicked out of every self-respecting criminal biking outfit on both coasts until they were forced to cling to the bottom rung of Florida’s biker community: The Riders of Eternal Doom, Sunshine Chapter.

The Riders had wanted a flaming skull and lots of daggers for their emblem, but they could only afford factory seconds from the uniform company. So instead they settled for reembroidered patches originally rejected by a Siesta Key ice cream parlor. The riders’ logo became a cobra wrapped around a triple scoop of Rocky Road.

The Riders had kicked out the three bikers that morning, tearing the patches off their jackets and confiscating their motorcycles.

Maybe it was their names, they thought. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm. Maybe they should have gone with a more violent tone instead of the antihygiene theme Ringworm had suggested.

Ringworm was the obvious leader of the crew, based purely on his hugeness. Stinky was excitable and easily panicked. Cheese-Dick got beat up a lot.

Ringworm was nothing less than a giant. About six-six and three hundred and fifty pounds, he usually wore an open leather jacket with no shirt. His belly was so swollen it extended up to the nipple line, and it had a large tattoo of the
Hindenburg
going down. Stinky was the middle in size, same propor
tions as Ringworm, just more in scale with the general population; he got his nickname from his nonstop nervous perspiration. Cheese-Dick was short and wide and had scars everywhere from his cavalcade of ass-kickings.

They walked down to the waterfront and signed on with a band of wildcat shrimpers who beat them up—Cheese-Dick first—and threw them overboard then minutes later.

They swam ashore on Lido Key and kicked in a sand castle.

Sharon thought Serge and Coleman were insufferable boobs. To think that she allowed Coleman to finance her cocaine habit!

She had intended to flop in the cigarmaker’s cottage only until her next grifter or smuggler boyfriend came along. If she hadn’t been in a world-record drought, she would never have allowed Serge to force her into stripping at The Red Snapper to help with room and board. Not that she had anything against stripping; she had a thing against ambition.

Sharon’s vixen looks instantly made her the most talented lap dancer in The Red Snapper, even though she refused to pay attention and stop chewing gum or smoking during the daily grinds. Her sole motivation was determining whether the next customer might be a Carlos Lehder or Robert Vesco. If one looked promising, she planned to take him to the spare office in back that some of the girls used for the high-rollers. Except that all her customers seemed to be fat guys in bowling shirts.

A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.

Serge told Sharon to stand lookout. A couple of times a week, he’d come by for tips on robbery candidates, looking for married, drunk, wimpy out-of-towners, preferably from overseas.

Serge, getting the report from Sharon one night, stopped and thought he heard something. “Is that a tuba?”

“From the back room,” Sharon said. “Don’t ask.”

Serge and Coleman followed the marks to their hotels, usually out on West Shore Boulevard. As the tourists chuckled and stumbled and began closing the hotel room door, Serge would kick it in and level revolvers in both hands.

“Which one of you dirty fucking cowards beat up the dancer at The Red Snapper? One of the girls pointed out your car!”

Usually they’d freeze or faint. One time four guys actually started pointing at each other. “It was him, I swear!”

By the time it was over, they were thrilled to give Serge all their money and jewelry and anything else he wanted.

“Okay, you guys look honest. I’ll just take this stuff as good faith. But if you’re lying…!”

They never called the cops.

Inside a month, Serge and Coleman had collected two thousand dollars, eleven watches, three cameras, a laptop computer, two camcorders, six cell phones, a derringer, a night vision scope, a leather jacket and another complete airline pilot’s uniform. When Sharon received her first one-third cut, she got with the program and more aggressively sought victims.

Between dances, Sharon worked on her two-pack-a-day cigarette hobby and wondered whether to get another tattoo. While straddling a customer, she noticed the two Canadians across the room.

Later, she made small talk with the tourists. She was bored, wanted to get something to drink and unwind after work. Hey—they were cute! Where were they staying? The Porpoise Inn on Waters Boulevard? Sure, she might hook up with them.

At four
A.M
. a delightfully surprised but groggy Canadian opened the door of room 14 at the single-story Porpoise Inn, circa 1953.

“I’m tipsy,” Sharon giggled, and stumbled into the room. The other Canadian turned on the light and squinted. She put her arms around the neck of the first and tongue-kissed him silly. Coleman and Serge ran into the room, and Sharon pulled back and punched the one she was kissing in the balls. She pointed at the tourist still in bed. “Shoot that fucker if he moves!”

Serge ripped apart luggage and dumped drawers, and Sharon and Coleman snorted lines of meth on top of the dresser. Between lines and ransacking, the trio realized the tourists were gone.

They ran to the door and saw a rented Taurus speeding out of the parking lot, west, toward Interstate 275, and they hopped in Sharon’s red Camaro. Northbound on the interstate, past the Bearss Avenue exit, there was nothing for twenty miles—no traffic lights, no exits and generally no cops as the road headed into Pasco County.

The Taurus was in the left lane and the Camaro caught it ten miles from the county line, pulling up on the right side. Serge drove with his right hand and shot a .380 automatic at the Taurus’s tires with his left. Sharon was in the front passenger seat, trying to hold her left hand still, snorting meth off the back of it.

The right front tire blew out and the Taurus careened into the median. The Camaro pulled over and Coleman and Serge sprinted down the embankment. The tourists were neutralized with a single punch in the head each. Wallets and watches were removed.

Sharon came running down the embankment, sizzling on meth, screaming, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” She pushed her head and arm into the front seat of the Taurus and shot both tourists in the face with the .380 that Serge had left on the Camaro’s front seat.

Serge and Coleman leaped back from the car.

“Oooo, that had to hurt,” said Coleman.

“That’ll teach ’em not to tip,” said Serge.

Coleman and Serge never mentioned the killing of the Canadians to Sharon after that night. It had taken them five high-wire minutes to get her to take her
cranked-out finger off the trigger and hand them the gun. A half hour later, as they drove over Tampa Bay, they had brought up the topic—maybe she was a smidgen out of line, putting them at risk—and Sharon went apeshit. She bounded up from the backseat and grabbed Serge from behind, around the neck, as he drove. Serge fought with the steering wheel, smacking the guardrail on the Howard Frank-land Bridge. He bent her fingers back, turned and scrambled over the top of the driver’s seat into the backseat, abandoning the driving duties. Coleman casually reached over with his left hand and grabbed the wheel, driving from the passenger side.

Serge pinned Sharon in the backseat and punched her in the face and stomach, again and again. Coleman straightened the car out and slowly climbed over the center console into the driver’s seat. Sharon was cursing, clawing and beating on Serge, who bashed her in the left cheek, trying to shut her up. But Coleman noticed a certain rhythm develop in the Camaro’s suspension. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the moonlight off Serge’s bare rear, popping in and out of view. Sharon spit in Serge’s face, grabbed his hair and pulled his face down for a hard kiss that busted both their lips. Coleman thought it was too violent to qualify for rough sex. More like an alley fight with a quickie worked into the choreography.

Sharon’s profanity grew louder, meaner and more poetic. They were westbound, Tampa to St. Petersburg, and when they hit the hump on the Howard
Frankland, Sharon went off like an Apache warrior charging over a hill.

“Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi!!!!!!”

It startled Coleman so badly he swerved into the lane on his left, overcorrected, and almost went in the water. He got a handle on the problem and accelerated.

Coleman took the exit at Twenty-second Avenue North and found an Addiction World convenience store on Fourth Street. It was five
A.M
. For breakfast, Coleman bought three sausage biscuits and a forty-four-ounce Thirst Mutilator, Serge a quart of OJ, Sharon cigarettes. She and Coleman each dropped a Roofie in front of the clerk, to cut into the crank, and washed it down with the soda. Coleman set the Thirst Mutilator down next to the cash register and poured in half a flask of Jim Beam. The clerk watched and yawned.

Serge took over the driving again, motoring aimlessly in the empty, predawn streets of St. Petersburg as Sharon and Coleman passed the spiked soda in the backseat, adding a joint to the mix. Nobody talking, relaxing, the twilight at the top of the ballistic trajectory when the day’s drug battle finally turns in favor of the downers. The radio was on medium volume, Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” as the car rolled under a series of synchronized stoplights. “
I am a traveler of both time and space
…” The sky toward Tampa started to glow, and Sharon and Coleman drifted toward crash. Serge drove out on the pier, sending gulls and pelicans into the air, and parked
in the valet section. Coleman and Sharon were out. Serge got a stolen Pentax from the trunk and took a dozen shots as the sun rose across the bay.

Sharon and Coleman awoke in a broken-down hotel on Fourth Avenue that had a palm-green canopy out to the sidewalk. It reminded Serge of St. Pete in its prime. He had checked them in, dragged each into the room. Told the clerk they had eaten bad seafood.

When they awoke, Serge was wired from skipping his medication. He said he was going to teach them to appreciate Florida.

“Let’s not and say we did,” said Sharon, and they slapped each other.

He took them to the Salvador Dalí Museum, but Coleman’s and Sharon’s brains only registered static.

“This is the epitome of the surrealist movement,” Serge tried to explain.

“Why does that guy’s head have a crater filled with seashells?” asked Coleman.

“Can’t you read?” said Serge. “It’s because he’s a bureaucrat!”

He drove them over to Treasure Island, where Serge said the motel strip reminded him of early Las Vegas: the Sands, the Thunderbird, the Bilmar, the Surf. He took them by Haslam’s bookstore, the art deco in decline on Fourth Street and the International Museum.

Sharon had her standard pissed-off expression, but she surprised herself by starting to enjoy the day. They went to a spring training game at Al Lang Sta
dium on the waterfront. She bought a baseball jersey that came down so low you couldn’t see her hot pants. She stood against the bullpen fence, attracting New York Yankees.

When a pop foul left the stadium, Sharon went after it.

“I got it!” I got it!” The ball bounced thirty feet when it hit Bay Shore Drive, and Sharon chased it into the yacht basin. She came up with the ball, but the seawall was too high for her to climb out. Half the bull-pen came to the rescue.

Sharon was sopping wet, looking hot, and two Yankees made crude remarks. She winked and gave them teasing looks over her shoulder as she walked toward the parking lot. One Yankee followed her to her car, and Serge followed the Yankee.

The murders of the Canadians made ripples in the press, but not as much as the robbery of the Yankees player. Serge had always wanted a World Series ring. For her part, Sharon hadn’t exhibited the first hint of violence since that weekend. But under her vibe Serge and Coleman had become increasingly brutal in subsequent robberies.

There were the two Brits, who said something ill-advised like “Now look here. This just isn’t civilized,” and carried their teeth home in their pockets.

There was the Japanese businessman, who reacted by blinking four hundred times a minute and making high-pitched peeping sounds like a baby chick. So Serge and Coleman beat him into an express coma.

And after each robbery, Serge and Sharon resumed
combat and copulation in the backseat while Coleman chauffeured them around, wondering, Is this what they meant when they said I’d regret dropping out of school?

Coleman was deliriously content, but Serge had bigger dreams.

“Tell me ’bout the office in back of the club again,” Serge asked Sharon.

“I told you already! Bunch of rich freaks. If they got enough money, they get whatever they want. One girl told me she made three hundred dollars sneezing on a guy’s cock.”

The next night Tiffany was on back-room watch, making sure nobody walked in on the action. Sharon handed Tiff a twenty, pointed a thumb at the man standing next to her. “Foot weirdo.”